Situated on the border between autobiography and fiction, The Enigma of Arrival belongs to a tradition of novels including Proust’s In Search of Lost Time and Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist. It tells the story of the narrator’s settling in England, his arrival at an understanding of England filtered necessarily through his colonial heritage, and his eventual writing of this very novel. Here we see the realization that the changes wrought on the English landscape and lifestyles by the newcomers are, in essence, no different to the narrator’s restyling of England for his own literary purposes: the colonies have already taken root in the colonizer. ABi
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1900s
World’s End
T. Coraghessan Boyle
Lifespan | b. 1948 (U.S.)
First Published | 1987
First Published by | Viking Press (New York)
PEN/Faulkner Award | 1988
World’s End is T. Coraghessan Boyle’s great novel, a grand symphony of themes, motifs, and variations. He roots it in the Hudson Valley, where the ancestral bond to the land—and actual ancestors—still suffocates the present. It is the story of the Van Brunts, a family abused by fate, and begins with a distant ancestor, Harmanus Van Brunt, the victim of the illusion of a better life who sails for New Amsterdam. Far from finding the promised land, he is beset by hardships and blights that could make the God of the Old Testament cringe. And so begins the curse, the bad luck, and loss of limbs. But these Van Brunts are not inculpable. They betray their own sons, their own fathers, wives, cousins, and in-laws. They succumb to passion and caprice. They are human; they are Americans. The future is adumbrated by the past, the past plays off the future. There can’t be losers without winners, however, and the winners are the Van Warts. Seventeenth-century patroons and tormenters of the Van Brunts, their ancestries are symbiotically entwined. They rule, and always will. But it does all end hopefully—or at least with the possibility of an end to the damage.
In World’s End, Boyle tackles three hundred years of history and myth in America, and does it with verbal sleight of hand and wickedly subversive wit. It is a breathtaking feat of prose. GT
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1900s
The Pigeon
Patrick Süskind
Lifespan | b. 1949 (Germany)
First Published | 1987
First Published by | Diogenes (Zürich)
Original Title | Die Taube
This short, tightly written novella is pervaded by a dark intensity. Patrick Süskind has been admired for his exploration of psychological themes and possesses a skill for closely drawing society’s outsider individuals and their peculiarities. Jonathan Noel, a somewhat eccentric Everyman, is a bank guard in his fifties who leads an almost automated existence of monotonous uniformity. He has withdrawn from all but the most perfunctory necessities of social interaction. Instead of depending upon people, who in his youth had consistently let him down or disappeared, Noel relies for stability on the simplicity of uneventfulness and the security of familiar surroundings and routines.
The novella takes place over twenty-four hours, beginning with an early morning encounter with a pigeon outside the studio apartment Noel has occupied for over thirty years. Looking into the bird’s eye, which seems devoid of life, Noel is precipitated into what is commonly and crudely known as a midlife crisis. The event is to disrupt and deeply disturb not only his regimen but also his carefully maintained internal equilibrium. For the first time in his life, he finds himself inattentive at work and unable to return home; for the first time, he questions the meaningfulness of the existence he has built for himself. Powerful for its potential universality, this short tale is also a persuasive examination of how an apparently trivial, if unusual, occurrence can force the self into new perspectives. JC
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1900s
Of Love and Shadows
Isabel Allende
Lifespan | b. 1942 (Peru)
First Published | 1987
First Published by | Plaza & Janés (Barcelona)
Original Title | De amor y de sombra
Born in Peru, Isabel Allende moved to Chile when her parents separated. In 1973, when General Pinochet assassinated her uncle, then president Salvador Allende, and began an era of military dictatorship that saw 11,000 Chileans perish in torture chambers, she inherited her family’s political legacy. While most of her family fled or were imprisoned, Isabel launched into the humanitarian work that enabled her to record interviews with the regime’s surviving victims, stating that “some day we would have democracy back and our evidence would help bring to justice the murderers and torturers.”
Allende’s second novel, Of Love and Shadows, refers to the real discovery of bodies of disaparecidos, disappeared people, in a mineshaft in 1978. The novel’s plot—a young fashion journalist falls in love with a photographer with whom she discovers the bodies of victims of Pinochet’s security forces—closely resembles Allende’s own transition from frivolous journalism to a more weighty career as novelist and political activist.
The love story at the heart of this novel is as pivotal as the politics it expresses, if only because it appropriates the distinctly female sentimental literary genre of the novella rosa, largely ignored by literary critics, and yet read by the masses. The combination of politics and populism is potent in realizing Allende’s mission to engage with a history that fails to appear in textbooks, and to honor the novel’s closing sentiment: “We will be back.” JSD
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1900s
Beloved
Toni Morrison
Lifespan | b. 1931 (U.S.)
First Published | 1987
First Published by | Knopf (New York)
Pulitzer Prize | 1988
Beloved has become an influential force in articulating the profound horror of slavery’s legacy in American culture. At the novel’s absent center are the consequences of the actions of Sethe, a mother who commits infanticide rather than allow her child to be taken back into the slavery from which she has just escaped. In the narrative’s opening, Sethe and her one remaining child live on in the house in which the crime occurred, now haunted by the hungry sadness of the dead child. The appearance of Paul D., who had shared Sethe’s traumatic experience of slavery on the ironically named “Sweet Home” Farm, appears to banish the ghost, only for her to reappear as the woman she would have been if allowed to live. Her now malevolent physical presence forces Paul D. away from the family and begins to punish Sethe. By the novel’s end, the community, which had been presented as complicit with the murder, regroups around the family and allows Sethe to be free and, finally, her lover to return.
The novel was critically acclaimed for finding an appropriate form for remembering the inhumane violence of slavery. Sethe’s slow and partial recollection of the debased treatment she endured during slavery, the emotional and physical hurts that carried her to a defensive act of infanticide, are central to the recovery the novel allows her. Morrison’s lack of recourse to either sentiment or identification make it one of the most startlingly powerful books in twentieth-century American literature. NM
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1900s
All Souls
Javier Marías
Lifespan | b. 1951 (Spain)
First Published | 1987
First Published in | Anagrama (Barcelona)
Original Title | Todas las almas
Three years after winning the Herralde de Novela prize with The Man of Feeling, Javier Marías published this work, the embodiment of an original, powerful novel, reflexive and flexible, given to speculation yet at the same time tempted toward more or less autobiographical truth.
From the start, the setting is suggested in the distance that lies between the narrator who is telling the story and the “I,” a different, distinct, other who is the person who lived it. The book is dedicated to his predeces
sors (Vicente Molina Foix and Félix de Azúa), among others, and Marías openly draws upon his experience as a teacher at Oxford University to recreate an almost private world, populated by characters with secret or only half-told stories, cults, and often adventurers wearing fancy dress (perhaps because “in Oxford nobody ever says anything clearly”). Some of these elements reappear in one form or another in later books, but already in this novel can be found valid rules for constructing stories around fictitious identities, the weight of words, and memory used in the construction of identity. The porous pliability of the language is turned to the unfolding of various pieces of knowledge, while the search for this or that title in secondhand bookstores, the reflexive conversations, and the theoretical debates about poetry or painting come together in a novel without apparent difficulty. With a slippery density of feeling, the book is certainly also enigmatic. JGG
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1900s
The New York Trilogy
Paul Auster
Lifespan | b. 1947 (U.S.)
First Published | 1987, by Faber & Faber (London)
Trilogy | City of Glass (1985), Ghosts (1986), The Locked Room (1986)
The first novella in The New York Trilogy, City of Glass was first published in 1985, when it was presented as detective fiction.
The New York Trilogy comprises three novellas that explore the possibility of meaningful coincidence, necessity, and accident through the conventions of detective fiction and ordinary people’s investigations of their mysterious worlds. City of Glass features a mystery writer, Daniel Quinn, with an insatiable love for the genre and its artificiality who, after answering two wrong number calls for the Paul Auster Detective Agency, decides to impersonate Auster and take the case. However, he is soon plunged into homeless ruin through his monomaniacal pursuit of a man who tried to beat his infant son into abandoning derivative, “human” language and letting a divine language pour forth. Yet, along with his inevitable desperation and hardship, Quinn seems to develop a Zen-like, uncluttered awareness as his world shrinks drastically. The characters of Ghosts, caught up in a highly stylized, surrealistic game of who’s watching who, are named after colors, lending a quasi-allegorical air to the action. Black’s inaction pushes Blue, the man hired to spy on him, both to read voraciously and nearly lose his mind. The Locked Room, itself named after a subgenre of detective fiction, watches an unnamed first-person narrator slowly take over the life of a disappeared childhood friend. He marries his wife and shepherds the publication of his previously unknown literary masterpiece, only to be contacted by said friend and informed that the whole scenario has been intricately orchestrated.
The New York Trilogy is full of terrifying brushes with the zero point that is both complete potentiality and the collapse of identity. The effect of deprivation forms an intriguing subtext to all three stories, not least with respect to their own sparse language and brevity, as the worlds of the novellas gradually drift or lurch toward nothingness. AF
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1900s
Black Box
Amos Oz
Lifespan | b. 1939 (Jerusalem)
First Published | 1987
First Published by | Am Oved (Tel Aviv)
Original Title | Kufsah Shorah
The cover of the original Hebrew edition of Oz’s Black Box; “Oz” is an adopted name, being the Hebrew word for “strength.”
“Activism is a Way of Life.”
A series of letters, notes, and telexes provide the documentation of a marriage breakdown as it happens; in a sense, these materials become the data inside a marital “black box.” The reader is left to decode with real feeling the disintegration of Ilana and Alex’s relationship in Israel and their struggle to settle the issues of their wayward son, Boaz. It is a tangled relationship into which Ilana’s second husband, Michel, an alternately funny, sad, and fanatical Jew, and others are drawn to complete a dysfunctional ensemble joined by marriage or profession. The correspondence allows Amos Oz to use different voices and tones to capture the frailty, sexuality, absurdity, and ambivalence of human existence in a religiously, politically, and socially charged environment. The tone of the book is sometimes desperate, sometimes seedy, but also comic and lyrical in turn.
As with his other tales of modern Jewish life, most famously Mikha’el Sheli in 1968 (My Michael, 1972), Oz uses the interaction between his characters—the complexities, guilt, and feelings of persecution inherent within their relationships—to open up a discourse on his country’s modern history, politics, and religious splinterings. Oz does not apologize for these but lets the characters play out his ironic take on modern Israeli life, with all its splits and strains. Writing in Hebrew (as with all his works), Oz gives an honest and often wry account of the conflicts inherent in being an Israeli. Like many of his generation, Oz is skeptical of the optimistic certainties of the founding settlers. Having served in the Israeli Army, been a part-time teacher, lived on a kibbutz, and studied at Oxford and in the United States, he certainly imparts an unusually broad perspective on the issues he tackles. JHa
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1900s
The Bonfire of the Vanities
Tom Wolfe
Lifespan | b. 1931 (U.S.)
First Published | 1987
First Published by | Farrar, Straus & Giroux (N.Y.)
First UK Edition | 1988, by Jonathan Cape (London)
Shown here is the UK edition, with jacket design by Mark Holmes. The novel was first serialized in Rolling Stone magazine.
“They’ll come see you!”
An ambitious brick of a book, Tom Wolfe’s first excursion out of the realm of journalism and into novel writing is a savage indictment of the excesses of 1980s Wall Street capitalism. Sherman McCoy, a wealthy, upwardly mobile bondtrader at a prestigious city firm, is involved in a car accident in the South Bronx, in which his mistress, Maria Ruskin, runs over and fatally injures a young black man, Henry Lamb. The novel charts the fall of the once-mighty Sherman, and the range of vested interests that contribute to his public disgrace, arraignment, and trial. While some people emerge triumphantly from the events the novel charts, morally there are no winners. Wolfe cynically suggests—and his own right-wing viewpoint is in evidence here—that the city’s political and legal systems, as well as its media, are all complicit in the complicated structures of class and race warfare he describes. The posthumous conversion of Lamb into an idealized “honors student,” for example, happens as a result of the career ambitions of the louche journalist Peter Fallow, who wins fame, fortune, and a Pulitzer Prize from his reporting of the accident.
Whatever one’s view of Wolfe’s politics, it is hard not to admire his prose. His minutely detailed accounts of Park Avenue apartments, the maze of Bronx streets, in which a panicked Sherman finds himself lost, the Southern drawl of Maria, and the impassioned accents of the Harlem-based black rights activist, the Reverend Bacon, render the sheer variety of New York with relish. This is a city seething with ethnic hostilities and class envy, driven by the desire to get rich quick; here sex, money, and power rule almost everyone. Wolfe makes good on his claim to offer a twentieth-century rival to the Victorian blockbusters of Dickens and Thackeray. CC
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1900s
The Black Dahlia
James Ellroy
Lifespan | b. 1948 (U.S.)
First Published | 1987
First Published by | Mysterious Press (New York)
Given Name | Lee Earle Ellroy
The unsolved murder of Ellroy’s mother, Geneva, in Los Angeles in 1958, shaped Ellroy’s life and led him to write crime novels.
James Ellroy’s The Black Dahlia, the first of a quartet of novels to pick the scab off L.A.’s dark underbelly between the late 1940s and mid-1950s, is both a straightforward police procedural and a complex, disquieting meditation on voyeurism and sexual obsession. At its heart is the horrific mu
rder of Elizabeth Short, a.k.a. the Black Dahlia, a young woman who arrives in Hollywood looking for stardom and romance, and finds only prostitution, pornography, and death. To track down her killer, police detective Bucky Bleichert must piece together the final days of her life, an act of recovery that brings him to confront not just powerful figures from the law enforcement and business communities, but also his own barely suppressed demons.
Later, Bleichert’s discovery of the murder “scene” in a building that, quite literally, supports part of the famous Hollywood sign, brings together the novel’s primary areas of concern: pornography, spectacle, and the construction industry. Just as the rebuilding of Los Angeles in the post-Second World War era involves physically scarring the landscape for profit, the spectacular cutting of Elizabeth Short is linked to the commercial ambitions of a sexually deviant property developer. In all of this, unlike Raymond Chandler’s archetypal detective, Bleichert cannot remain emotionally and sexually detached: his own obsession with the murdered woman ruins both his marriage and his promising career. The scene where he lures a prostitute back to a motel room littered with photographs of Elizabeth Short’s horribly mutilated corpse, and forces the terrified woman to dress up as the Black Dahlia, is as disturbing as it is effective. Though the killer is eventually revealed, it is the supersaturation of violence, sexual depravity, and corruption that endures. AP
1001 Books: You Must Read Before You Die Page 90